2004: Top (Archaeological) Finds On Bolivian Highlands
Finnish scientists discovered the most significant relics of antiquity in recent Bolivian history.
Posted on 04/29/2009 6:13:15 AM PDT by Pharmboy
For two decades, researchers have been using a growing volume of genetic data to debate whether ancestors of Native Americans emigrated to the New World in one wave or successive waves, or from one ancestral Asian population or a number of different populations.
Now, after painstakingly comparing DNA samples from people in dozens of modern-day Native American and Eurasian groups, an international team of scientists thinks it can put the matter to rest: Virtually without exception the new evidence supports the single ancestral population theory.
“Our work provides strong evidence that, in general, Native Americans are more closely related to each other than to any other existing Asian populations, except those that live at the very edge of the Bering Strait,” said Kari Britt Schroeder, a lecturer at the University of California, Davis, and the first author on the paper describing the study.
“While earlier studies have already supported this conclusion, what’s different about our work is that it provides the first solid data that simply cannot be reconciled with multiple ancestral populations,” said Schroeder, who was a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the university when she did the research.
The study is published in the May issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
The team’s work follows up on earlier studies by several of its members who found a unique variant (an allele) of a genetic marker in the DNA of modern-day Native American people. Dubbed the “9-repeat allele,” the variant (which does not have a biological function), occurred in all of the 41 populations that they sampled from Alaska to the southern tip of Chile, as well as in Inuit from Greenland and the Chukchi and Koryak people native to the Asian (western) side of the Bering Strait. Yet this allele was absent in all 54 of the Eurasian, African and Oceanian groups the team sampled.
Overall, among the 908 people who were in the 44 groups in which the allele was found, more than one out of three had the variant.
In these earlier studies, the researchers concluded that the most straightforward explanation for the distribution of the 9-repeat allele was that all modern Native Americans, Greenlanders and western Beringians descend from a common founding population. Furthermore, the fact that the allele was absent in other Asian populations most likely meant that America’s ancestral founders had been isolated from the rest of Asia for thousands of years before they moved into the New World: that is, for a period of time that was long enough to allow the allele to originate in, and spread throughout, the isolated population.
As strong as this evidence was, however, it was not foolproof. There were two other plausible explanations for the widespread distribution of the allele in the Americas.
If the 9-repeat allele had arisen as a mutation multiple times, its presence throughout the Americas would not indicate shared ancestry. Alternatively, if there had been two or more different ancestral founding groups and only one of them had carried the 9-repeat allele, certain circumstances could have prompted it to cross into the other groups and become widespread. Say that there was a second allele — one situated very close to the 9-repeat allele on the DNA strand — that conferred a strong advantage to humans who carried it. Natural selection would carry this allele into new populations and because of the mechanics of inheritance, long stretches of DNA surrounding it, including the functionless 9-repeat allele, would be carried along with the beneficial allele.
To rule out these possibilities, the research team, which was headed by Noah Rosenberg at the University of Michigan, scrutinized DNA samples of people from 31 modern-day Asian populations, 19 Native American, one Greenlandic and two western Beringian populations.
They found that in each sample that contained the 9-repeat allele, short stretches of DNA on either side of it were characterized by a distinct pattern of base pairs, a pattern they seldom observed in people without the allele. “If natural selection had promoted the spread of a neighboring advantageous allele, we would expect to see longer stretches of DNA than this with a similarly distinct pattern,” Schroeder said. “And we would also have expected to see the pattern in a high frequency even among people who do not carry the 9-repeat allele. So we can now consider the positive selection possibility unlikely.”
The results also ruled out the multiple mutations hypothesis. If that had been the case, there would have been myriad DNA patterns surrounding the allele rather than the identical characteristic signature the team discovered.
“There are a number of really strong papers based on mitochondrial DNA — which is passed from mother to daughter — and Y-chromosome DNA — which is passed from father to son — that have also supported a single ancestral population,” Schroeder said. “But this is the first definitive evidence we have that comes from DNA that is carried by both sexes.”
Other authors of the study are David G. Smith, a professor of anthropology at UC Davis; Mattias Jacobsson, University of Michigan and Uppsala University in Sweden; Michael H. Crawford, University of Kansas; Theodore Schurr, University of Pennsylvania; Simina Boca, Johns Hopkins University; Donald F. Conrad and Jonathan Pritchard, University of Chicago; Raul Tito and Ripan Malhi, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Ludmilla Osipova, Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk; Larissa Tarskaia, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Sergey Zhadanov, University of Pennsylvania and Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk; and Jeffrey D. Wall, UC San Francisco.
The work was supported by NIH grants to Rosenberg and Smith and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to Schroeder.
.....How does this reconcile with the language evidence seemingly proving separate migrations......
Although the article said the 9 repeat allele had no biological function, it would appear that it did. The function was murderous aggression trait.
All the men were killed and the women enslaved. The previous migration populations were absorbed by warfare and attrition
THANKS
“Furthermore, the fact that the allele was absent in other Asian populations most likely meant that America’s ancestral founders had been isolated from the rest of Asia for thousands of years before they moved into the New World: that is, for a period of time that was long enough to allow the allele to originate in, and spread throughout, the isolated population.”
I’m gonna have to call BS.
How is it these learned men didn’t include the possibility of these *natives* being here (in America) all along?
I’ll come over when I have time, wait for me?
Short version: “Native Americans” were the last migration to America. After they arrived, they murdered to extinction the earlier immigrants from Europe, who had arrived thousands of years earlier by following the glacial shore in small boats from what is now Spain to what is now Canada, hunting fish and mammals as they came in small groups in short steps.
Were these Euro-Americans so helpless? Did they not have weapons to defend themselves, or were they used to an Eden-like environment so they became easy targets?
What, you are not going to cut and paste as usual?
Most people make that maistake about oil...they were after the sweet potatoes.
They traded chickens for potatoes.
Volume 61 Number 1, January/February 2008
by Eric A. Powell
"Scholars have long assumed the Spaniards first introduced chickens to the New World along with horses, pigs, and cattle. But now radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a chicken bone excavated from a site in Chile suggest Polynesians in oceangoing canoes brought chickens to the west coast of South America well before Europe's "Age of Discovery."
[snip]
2004: Top (Archaeological) Finds On Bolivian Highlands
Finnish scientists discovered the most significant relics of antiquity in recent Bolivian history.
Yes, I know. We (in error) call sweet potatoes yams because that's what African slaves called them here in the American south.
I don't know why sweet potatoes migrated west but they did.
I know - I was bein' a wise guy. stage left and right is always confusing to me.
They thought a Missouri mob was out to get 'em!
I have to agree with squarebarb’s comment in #19.
In all likelihood, the population was actually Beringian, not Eurasian nor American.
The bering strait land bridge was more than a bridge, it was a fertile land mass, thriving with game, and probably warmed by pacific sea currents.
It would have been isolated during the last ice age, and the human population that existed there would have had plenty of time to develop unique genetic characteristics.
At the end of the ice age, some of the population went west, and some went east, into the americas.
Ha - I assumed I was saying it incorrectly - glad to know you were just being a smarty pants. ;^)
Likewise, "they" murdered to near extinction earlier south american immigrants from Australia.
We have archaeological evidence as well as DNA evidence of those populations.
I am not a geneticist or anything but as an avid genealogist I got my DNA tested with Family Tree DNA of Houston Texas. They are the largest DNA lab and have the largest current database. There are over 5,000 different studies going on that cover surnames, ethnicity and geographical sample groups.
They are working with the National Geographic Human Genome and Migration study based at the University of Arizona. According to them, there are Indians from the East coast of North America who exhibit European haplotypes even though their genealogical or historical documentation show no late generation mingling with European settlers. I believe in particular, the Chippewa and Ojibway have been mentioned as having a higher incidence of this characteristic.
There was a program on the History Channel called “10,000 BC”, which studied this Ice Age migration from Western Europe. I won’t disagree with scientists who specialize in genetics but I do question the contradictory nature of this study when there are others currently ongoing that seem to indicate the possibility that North America was settled by two different groups from both East and West. The genes don’t lie, and if an individual’s genetic information cannot be connected to someone in recorded memory then the ancestor goes further back than the modern period of European settlement.
It has been very enlightening to know ones own Haplogroup and Haplotype but it has also been a great dissappointment to some when their genetic signature is not what they were expecting! The bottom line is that the scientific community seems to agree that humanity originated in Africa and the path of genetic migration seems to have confirmed that theory. We all owe our existence to wandering bands of hunter gatherers who ventured out of Africa and covered the globe.
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